Several small features and bugs

[AidanNotFunny]

Hello. Been daily driving COSMIC on Arch for about 5 months now, and while I love it, there are a few small usability + QoL changes that could make the desktop even better and take it from good to even better. Here are some of my small things. I'll sort them from bugs to features to comments.

--FEATURES--

• Set custom mod key (Ex: Change the super mod key to alt)
• Ability to set default applications in the settings (See KDE and GNOME for inspiration)
• Customizable touchpad gestures (ex, changing workspace swipe to 3 instead of 4 fingers, custom command executes on swipe)
• Ability to change the mouse cursor graphically, maybe even make it follow the user's color scheme? With some custom templates? (Ex: Default windows style cursor, Bibata template, Breeze, the like. Apply the user's theming and colors onto the template.)
• Lower than 0 mouse speed for extremely high DPIs
• Finer customization for panel and dock applets (Ex: Change the "Applications" button to be an emoji or say some other text)
• Animated wallpapers with .gif support
• Slideshow duration shorter than 5 minutes, maybe a configurable second length
• Custom theme also applies to Qt apps? (This one is very nitpicky and probably much harder than it seems to do, but the GTK implementation works so well that it'd be really cool to unify all the toolkits with your COSMIC theme)
• New Applet: MPRIS (Lets you see your music via integration with MPRIS and playerctl.) (Update: After using the desktop more, it appears to already have MPRIS integration! Doesn't take away from the fact that a dedicated applet would be cool, maybe configurable to show song name, artist, album, etc. The play/pause button is cool but not really enough to be useful imo.)
• New Applet: Weather (Automatically has geolocation with geoclue2 [togglable in settings, if disabled user manually inputs location], shows current weather)
• Devices with accelerometers will have screen auto-rotation depending on orientation
• Touchscreen gestures
• On-screen keyboard for touchscreen users (Can be called by swiping up with three fingers on the touchscreen, or by swiping in from the bottom of the screen)
• Pling integration for getting new cursor themes, icon themes, that kind of thing
• Desktop widgets? I personally don't care for them, but some people (including the Tiling WM folk) seem to like them. Maybe adapt the existing applets to be able to be placed on the desktop?
• Ability to disable title bars (or at least change the size of them)
• New App: cosmic-menu-editor (Similar to alacarte, allows users to easily edit and manage .desktop files with a GUI.)
• NixOS: Add Nixpkgs support to cosmic-store (Allow either the option of an installation using nix-env, or adding the package to either the system/user packages in configuration.nix) (Very small and minor! Probably wouldn't affect very many people, especially since those on NixOS are likely already well versed in the CLI and the Nix language. Would still be cool though.)
• New App: cosmic-task-manager (Similar to task manager on windows, or the GNOME system monitor. Allows users to see running processes, kill them, see how much resources they take up, etc.)
• Add the option to fine-tune the roundness of window borders by pixels
• Night mode/screen warmth adjustment option (Would be really, really cool if this could integrate with the geoclue2 geolocation from earlier, providing a cohesive and easy experience.)
• New Applet: update-notifier. Automatically notify user whenever updates release, and show how many updates in the applet and provide a button to update. On Arch, hook into an AUR helper like paru to include AUR. Flatpak should be supported as well.

--BUGS--

• Holding down volume and brightness keys does not repeat the action over and over, requiring the user to rapid-press the key.
• UI does not work very well or at all with touchscreens

--COMMENTS-- Overall, given that it is an alpha, I am more than blown away by COSMIC! The DE is already in a very good place, with several QoL features and other things that immediately set it apart from other desktops! (Ex: Auto-tiling, GTK auto theming, coherent themes) It is blazing-fast, and has a clear focus on the user, productivity, and being fun to use and getting out of the way, letting you do work. It has very minimal bugs for being so early in development, and the bugs are incredibly minor. If anything, some of the features I mentioned earlier impact my usage more than the actual bugs. If I can help in any way testing new features, bugs, or the like, let me know. I am very excited and hopeful for what the Pop team and System76 will come up with next. Thank you for the excellent software!

Edit: The list has really thinned out since I created it! I added and tweaked a few things as well. COSMIC is in an even better place now, and I can't wait to see where it goes!

[nevdelap]

A couple of those already exist:

• Keyboard shortcuts are in ~/.config/cosmic/com.system76.CosmicSettings.Shortcuts/v1/custom.
• Custom keyboard shortcuts to launch apps or do other things is already in settings.

[9SMTM6]

Custom theme also applies to Qt apps? (This one is very nitpicky and probably much harder than it seems to do, but the GTK implementation works so well that it'd be really cool to unify all the toolkits with your COSMIC theme)

has a separate issue btw, #103. Note also that currently some KDE apps are horribly broken, like Dolphin.

[Kibranoz]

I would personnally prefer swiping up to display the dock, so it would be nice to have configurable gestures.

[AidanNotFunny]

Hey all. Made this comment months ago and didn't really look back. A few of my suggestions have been implemented, which is great! When I get back on my computer, I'll update the base comment with a checklist on whether something is done, in the works, or not done. You all may need to ping me when things get done, as sometimes i have to do other things with my life besides keeping track of every COSMIC commit lmao

[nevdelap]

May I suggest that you raise individual issues for unrelated items if they don't already have issues raised and close this off so that it doesn't need to be kept up-to-date separately? Your personal list of things you'd like doesn't help the developers manage their project, whether it is up-to-date or not. Where there is a feature request for something on your list it doesn't help that it is duplicated on your list, and it cannot/won't/shouldn't be closed off as a duplicate of an issue that is long wish list.